Samsung used its July 22 Galaxy Unpacked event in London to make two very different bets at once: that the foldable phone, five generations after its clumsy debut, is finally mainstream enough to specialize, and that smart glasses — a category Samsung has watched Meta run away with for two years — are worth a second, more serious attempt.
The headline hardware is the Galaxy Z Fold 8 lineup, which now splits into two models instead of one. The standard Z Fold 8 keeps the familiar book-style form factor, while the new Z Fold 8 Ultra is a shorter, wider variant Samsung is positioning as the volume seller of the two — a shape closer to a normal phone when folded, addressing the single most common complaint about book-style foldables since they launched: that they are too narrow and awkward to use one-handed when closed. Alongside both, Samsung refreshed the clamshell Z Flip 8.
On paper, the Z Fold 8 Ultra is a meaningful jump rather than an incremental refresh. It runs a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy chip, pairs with up to 16GB of RAM, and packs a 5,000mAh battery into a body Samsung says is slimmer than its predecessor while also delivering a nearly crease-free inner display — the visible fold line has been the one physical reminder, every time you unfold the phone, that you paid a premium for a compromise. The camera system was upgraded too: a 200-megapixel main sensor, a 50-megapixel ultra-wide, and a 10-megapixel telephoto with 3x optical zoom, with improved video support across all three.
None of that comes cheap. In the US, the Z Fold 8 Ultra starts at $2,099 for the base 12GB/256GB configuration, climbing to $2,299 for 512GB and $2,699 for the top 1TB tier, with UK pricing starting at £1,899. Both the Ultra and the standard Z Fold 8 are available for pre-order immediately, with wider release set for August 7.
The more interesting bet is Samsung’s smart glasses, unveiled at the same event without a price tag attached. The glasses run on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon AR1 Gen1 chip, integrate Google Gemini as their assistant, and pack a built-in camera capable of reading a whiteboard or a slide deck and turning it into organized notes on the spot. They can summarize incoming messages, walk a wearer through turn-by-turn navigation, and handle live translation — the same basic feature set every major smart glasses pitch has converged on, from Meta’s Ray-Bans onward. Battery life is rated at up to nine hours per charge, with the charging case good for roughly seven additional full charges. Samsung launched two design lines at once, one built with Gentle Monster and one with Warby Parker, and executives described the glasses as a “premium” product that will sell through those eyewear partners’ own retail channels rather than Samsung’s usual carrier-driven phone distribution.
The decision to withhold pricing entirely, while confirming only an audio-only model shipping this fall, tells you Samsung is still working out how to talk about this category rather than how to build it. Meta has spent two years and several hundred million Ray-Ban units normalizing the idea that a camera on someone’s face is not inherently unsettling, and Samsung is arriving into a market where the hardest problem — social acceptance — has already been partly solved by someone else. That is either a gift or an admission that Samsung is following rather than leading, depending entirely on how the glasses actually perform once real pricing and reviews land later this year.
What ties the foldables and the glasses together is Samsung’s clearest signal yet that its phone strategy has stopped being about one flagship line and started being about a portfolio of specialized form factors: a standard slab phone for people who want nothing to think about, a wider foldable for people who want a small tablet, and now a wearable for people who want a screen out of their hands altogether. That is a more mature, and more expensive to sustain, strategy than “one phone, better every year,” and it puts real pressure on Samsung’s software team to make Galaxy AI and Gemini feel coherent across three very different pieces of hardware rather than three separate demos stitched together for a keynote.
It also puts Samsung in a slightly awkward position relative to its own biggest software partner. Gemini now sits at the center of Samsung’s flagship phones, its foldables, and its first pair of glasses — which means Samsung’s hardware ambitions and Google’s AI ambitions are now tied together across an entire device family, for better or worse, in a way that gives Samsung less room to differentiate on intelligence and more incentive to compete purely on the hardware itself.
What This Means for Philippine Founders
The Z Fold 8 Ultra’s Philippine pricing — from ₱123,990 up to ₱165,990 depending on storage, with the standard Z Fold 8 starting at ₱109,990 — puts these devices well outside mass-market reach even with the installment financing Samsung is offering locally through UnionBank and Metrobank. That is worth noting for any Philippine founder building consumer apps around the assumption that foldable-specific features, like genuine split-screen multitasking or a larger canvas for productivity and creative tools, will matter to a broad local user base any time soon: the realistic addressable market for Fold-specific design work in the Philippines remains a narrow, high-income slice for at least another generation or two of the product. The smart glasses are a more useful signal to watch than to build for immediately. Gemini’s presence on Samsung’s new hardware, layered on top of its existing presence across Android phones, reinforces that any Philippine startup building on Google’s AI stack is building on infrastructure Google is actively extending into new device categories — a reasonable bet for anyone building assistant-adjacent tools, but a fragile one for anyone whose product depends on being the only interface between a user and their phone.
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